I had a strange dream last night.
I was somewhere called Goldenwood Prep School, which was apparently a prestigious institution, though it didn’t feel prestigious. It felt like a place that had been through too much and was trying not to show it. Dragon attack. Zombie incursion. Relocated briefly to a different plane. The headmistress, a woman named Calissa Wheatthorne, told us all of this as though reciting a list of minor inconveniences.
In the courtyard there was a statue of a former headmaster. Very stern looking. Commanding, even.
Someone had drawn anatomically accurate illustrations all over him. All over his cloak. Every inch of it.
The girl responsible was standing beside the headmistress, covered in paint, looking enormously pleased with herself.
I don’t know why dreams do that. Put someone in a situation that is clearly bad and give them a face that says it was completely worth it.
The graffiti could not be removed. The caretaker was trying. It wasn’t happening. And the defacement had apparently done something to the wall between here and wherever old teachers go, because the school was now haunted by the ghosts of former faculty, and the students couldn’t get into the library to revise for their exams.
We were asked to help.
We helped.
The library ghost introduced herself as KR Joylings, and she had opinions. Very specific opinions about the nature of things, about what counted as what, about what should be allowed to become what. She asked us where we stood on the matter, one by one, with the certainty of someone who already knew what answer she was looking for.
Gloom told her he only had opinions about humans.
That seemed to satisfy no one but Gloom.
I tried to be polite about it. I usually do.
Her manuscript was there on the librarian’s desk. The one she’d apparently always wanted to publish. A story about a wizard boy and a very pale man. It was, to put it gently, not the sort of literature I would have expected to find in a school.
We persuaded her to leave, which was a thing that happened. I’m not sure exactly how.
The fencing studio came next. Four swords floating in the air, sparring with each other as though they’d been doing it for years and had no intention of stopping. Gloom walked in and started sparring with them, which meant we all had to.
I heated one of them until it melted.
There’s something satisfying about that as a solution to a flying sword. It stops being a sword very quickly.
The ghost of the fencing tutor erupted from the slag. That was less satisfying.
At some point Piss Boy got possessed.
I don’t know what else to call him. That was his name in the dream, or close enough to it. He was young. He was a commoner who had somehow ended up in a party of adventurers, which in my experience never ends well for the commoner.
The wraith that took him looked wrong in him. His face went wrong. Old. Decayed. His hands left marks on whatever they touched.
We had to knock him out to get it out of him.
Gloom suplexed him.
He woke up fine afterwards, which I think says more about the resilience of young apprentices than anything else I could say.
The final ghost was the headmaster himself. Or what was left of him. He had been possessing a teacher, pulling her bones wrong, showing her teeth through her cheek. He wanted an apology for the statue.
We told him we’d give Ofsted a good report.
He seemed to like that more than he probably should have.
In the end, the girl who had drawn all over the statue was brought forward. She said she regretted nothing and called the headmaster something I hadn’t heard before.
He took it as a compliment and left.
That’s how it ended. Not with a fight. Not with fire. Just with a child who refused to say sorry and a ghost who decided that was close enough.
I woke up not entirely sure what any of it meant.
I still have the manuscript, I think. Somewhere.
I’m not sure I’ll read it again.
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